Say It

After a promising debut, Warp's spazz-pop band sounds adrift and unmoored on their second LP.

Luke Lalonde is a pretty good singer. On Born Ruffians' full-length debut, 2008's Red Yellow & Blue, his voice was a tightly coiled spring that popped off in all the right places, hugging the record's herky-jerky rhythms close and often acting as a primer for the splashes of colorful guitar riffs that ran throughout the record. Even more impressive was his memorable turn on "Jamelia", from Caribou's latest, Swim. Lalonde softly vibed over the track's muted tones and shuffling beat before exploding during its fireworks finale.

So, yeah, guy's got some chops-- not that you would be able to tell from Born Ruffians' sophomore full-length bow, Say It. Lalonde seems to be cursed with a sense of tonal amnesia here; he squeaks when trying to reach his upper register, and when he takes on a lower end, it almost sounds like a piss-take. Sometimes, he sounds out of breath after singing just a few bars of melody; other times, he tries to cram so many melodic syllables into a single run that you wish he'd go get himself a spritzer and chill out or something. The overall result sounds untrained and amateurish-- not off-kilter, just plain off.

That amateurishness, unfortunately, extends to most of Say It. Much of the material sounds rushed and half-finished, like a high schooler trying to write a research page paper during his lunch period. Drummer Steven Hamelin sounds so loose that his kit might just collapse if touched-- and when the time comes for him to add some urgency, he struggles to keep the tempo altogether. Most of Lalonde's guitar lines are skeletal where they should be muscular and overdone when more restraint is needed. It feels like the band has completely forgotten any sense of instrumental competence or urgency that was well exhibited on Red Yellow & Blue.

Save for the charmingly slack "Blood, the Sun & Water", it appears they forgot the key to compelling song structures as well. Songs like "Oh Man" and "The Ballad of Moose Bruce" open with promising melodies but go nowhere, repeating themselves ad nauseam, as if they were out of ideas. Worse, "Retard Canard" and "Higher & Higher" lack any sort of structure altogether, the former hitting melodic dead ends that don't take and the latter sounding like a tunelessly arrhythmic Talking Heads rip-off.

Both lazy and painfully forced, Say It is a paradoxically bad album-- fitting, then, that the album's most melodically inoffensive cut, "Sole Brother", is the biggest lyrical stinker. "Sole Brother" slowly concerns into what might be the most inane First World Problem expressed in musical form so far this year: doing your chores. Lalonde whines (literally) about having to help his 77-year-old grandfather with yard work, before issuing the following piddling complaint: "You never ask sister/ To help with the chores that are physically straining/ And sometimes/ I wish/ That I was/ A sole brother." (Even worse is the song's second half, sung in thin-lipped falsetto by Hamelin, in which he namechecks rappers like Raekwon, Ghostface, and Lil' Wayne, professing, "I love you/ I wish I was a soul brother.") Yes, he wishes his sister didn't exist, because he has to rake the leaves. Lord knows what his sister will think once she hears this record.